A real estate development company is looking to expand the area's cold storage space by adding a $40 million facility in northern New Hanover County.

Greenville, South Carolina-headquartered RealtyLink LLC is eyeing properties to develop an up to 200,000-square-foot freezer/cooler storage space expandable up to 400,000 square feet, said Thomas Eldridge, principal at RealtyLink.

The company is considering two sites and within the next couple of weeks plans to announce where the project will be built. The timing, however, is for the cold storage facility to be open and operating by the summer of 2022, Eldridge said.

The company is estimating that the operation of the cold storage facility could bring about 70 jobs to the region. 

The Wilmington project is one of four cold storage developments RealtyLink has planned. The developer has also announced plans to build facilities in Houston; Mobile, Alabama; and Charleston, South Carolina.

"They all have similar timing. And it's a port-centric strategy," Eldridge said this week.

"There's a tremendous demand," he said. "Our port cities are vastly underserved from a cold storage standpoint, and in order to facilitate the growth of the ports you need more cold storage. You can't bring the cold product in or ship it out until you have a facility to support that commerce at the port."

Plans are to build three chambers inside the Wilmington facility, at 70,000 square feet each, that can be altered by temperature, anywhere from minus 10 degrees, for uses such as freezing protein, or up to 40 degrees for fruits and vegetables.

"The vast majority of the cold storage facilities currently in North Carolina are ammonia-based systems for refrigeration. Once you build those facilities, you can't really change them. So if they are built for a certain temperature, you can't go back and revamp it, which is very costly," Eldridge said. "But what we're building is a Freon-based refrigeration system, [that is] adaptable and very versatile."

The facility could support various sectors, including grocers, protein processors and fruit and vegetable importers, he said.

"There are several different paths we can take. We can design and build this for a specific operator like a grocery store, or we can design it specifically for a third-party logistics operator, in which case they would be the ones owning the facility and would be responsible for managing the tenants inside," Eldridge said.

The developer's plans also include office space as well as 29 dock doors and two drive-in ramps.

Eldridge said a tenant for the project could come in the next 90 days.

RealtyLink is working with officials in Wilmington, including Wilmington Business Development and N.C. Ports officials at the Port of Wilmington.

There is already one cold storage facility, the Port of Wilmington Cold Storage, in which the port leases just over 4 acres of its property for the 101,000-square-foot, privately owned facility.

"The port is ready for the future," Eldridge said, adding that the Wilmington port has been designed to meet the needs of big ships, but the area has gaps in the cold storage market that the real estate company is trying to address with this project. 

The land to support a cold storage facility is also more available and easier to find in the Wilmington area, as opposed to other neighboring markets, such as Norfolk, Virginia, he said. 

"I think Wilmington is primed and well-positioned for the future ... and there is definitely a need for more cold storage," Eldridge said. "It's opportunistic, and it's constant with the port-centric strategy that we're building in the other markets. Yes, it is the smaller of those three other markets. But at the same time, it doesn't change the opportunity that exists in front of us for Wilmington and for North Carolina. We are more than happy to be the spearhead to facilitate the growth the port is trying to achieve."